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“Birth control best way to avoid unwanted children”

Thus read the headline for a letter to the editor, in the May 10, 2015 edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“Unwanted children” – a commonly used term of complete detachment and one of the most condemning of our time.

The presence of these “excess” children is not because we have insufficient resources in our wonderful planet. Rather, it’s from a simple lack of love which views children as a penalty to be avoided when having fun in bed.

It’s a problem of priorities. I’m a fan of professional sports. However, it’s discouraging to see a preponderance of ads in sporting event broadcasts selling sex aids to those of us in the normal, declining activity years, but who are still healthy. Also, there’s no shortage of tax money to assist well-to-do team owners and athletes make even more money – while vulnerable young lives go wanting because of our collective indifference.

This is not to suggest that couples should have unlimited children. There are responsible and healthier ways than chemical means to space children, but that is not the purpose of this article.

Our society’s philosophy has digressed into a self-centered strategy. It reduces the gift of human life to a commodity which is to be managed in the same way we choose pets, breed cattle for market or adjust hunting seasons to prevent animal overpopulation.

Dealing with “Unwanteds” Past and Present

Designating some human lives as “unwanted” has led to the greatest mistreatment of peoples throughout history starting with Biblical accounts. But it is certainly not restricted to pre-modern times. Hitler always comes to mind as the king of savagery, yet his 6+ million murders and countless tortures could be argued to take second place to Stalin’s at least twenty million killings including the seven million by forced famine in 1932-33.1,2 Numerous “ethnic cleansings” is the recent euphemism for eliminating unwanteds.

Our Shame

Our nation is not innocent. Lives lost through displacement of the American Indians/ “Native Americans” including “The Trail of Tears” in 1836 has stained our country’s soul.3

Even today, we get rid of “unwanted children” through the efforts of “clinics’ such as Planned Parenthood whose founder Margaret Sanger wrote: “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

She also wrote about immigrants and the poor: “They are…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ ’spawning… human beings who never should have been born.”

“Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease…Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks [of people] that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.”4

We ridicule the barbarism of times past, yet we have proven that technology without wisdom leaves us with no more reason to be proud than our distant ancestors. We must eliminate the term “unwanted children” from our vocabulary for us to be pointed in the right direction.